Book Image

Unity 2017 Game Optimization - Second Edition

By : Chris Dickinson
Book Image

Unity 2017 Game Optimization - Second Edition

By: Chris Dickinson

Overview of this book

Unity is an awesome game development engine. Through its massive feature-set and ease-of-use, Unity helps put some of the best processing and rendering technology in the hands of hobbyists and professionals alike. This book shows you how to make your games fly with the recent version of Unity 2017, and demonstrates that high performance does not need to be limited to games with the biggest teams and budgets. Since nothing turns gamers away from a game faster than a poor user-experience, the book starts by explaining how to use the Unity Profiler to detect problems. You will learn how to use stopwatches, timers and logging methods to diagnose the problem. You will then explore techniques to improve performance through better programming practices. Moving on, you will then learn about Unity’s built-in batching processes; when they can be used to improve performance, and their limitations. Next, you will import your art assets using minimal space, CPU and memory at runtime, and discover some underused features and approaches for managing asset data. You will also improve graphics, particle system and shader performance with a series of tips and tricks to make the most of GPU parallel processing. You will then delve into the fundamental layers of the Unity3D engine to discuss some issues that may be difficult to understand without a strong knowledge of its inner-workings. The book also introduces you to the critical performance problems for VR projects and how to tackle them. By the end of the book, you will have learned to improve the development workflow by properly organizing assets and ways to instantiate assets as quickly and waste-free as possible via object pooling.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Software and Hardware List
Preface

Avoid re-parenting Transforms at runtime


In earlier versions of Unity (version 5.3 and older), the references to Transform Components would be laid out in memory in a generally random order. This meant that iteration over multiple Transforms was fairly slow due to the likelihood of cache-misses. The upside was that re-parenting a GameObject to another one wouldn't really cause a significant performance hit since the Transforms operated a lot like a Heap data structure which tend to be relatively fast at insertion and deletion. This behaviour wasn't something we could control, and so we simply lived with it.

However, since Unity 5.4 and beyond, the Transform Component's memory layout has changed significantly. Since then, a Transform Component's parent-child relationships have operated more like dynamic arrays, whereby Unity attempts to store all Transforms that share the same parent sequentially in memory inside a pre-allocated memory buffer and are sorted by their depth in the Hierarchy...